Recently, as I was leaving home for a meetup, my girlfriend remarked that she envies our (software development) community for the way we share our wisdom and experience among ourselves. Until then, I hadn’t realized it was not so common in other fields, and I consider myself lucky to be part of such a community.
But the endless stream of meetups, conference talks, podcasts, videos, blog posts and other content also puts a strain on one’s ability to process all the information. Often I stumble upon an interesting link on social media or in a newsletter, but the blog post is too long a read for that particular moment. Or I have time to read it and find the information valuable, but not relevant at that point.
I’ve had a (lack of a) system in place for this: I would keep the browser tabs open – three different sets of tabs on three different devices – in case I might want to revisit the content later – which I seldom would. Maybe you can relate.
Then, a few days ago, one stray link on Bluesky led me to Jim Nielsen’s blog. I’ve poked around and found this page where Jim shares the content of others and comments on that. And I’ve fallen in love with the idea.
It’s like a repost on a social media, but with a few very important distinctions:
It’s much more thoughtful. It allows you to engage with the content in a more meaningful way than clicking the repost button. You can add value to the original content by sharing your thoughts. I know you can comment on the social media, but that leads me to the next point:
It’s much less interactive. The goal here is not to spark discussion – or at least not a quick-fire discussion where you have to condense your thoughts into a few hundred characters. The goal, as I see it, is to promote quality content of others, and optionally add your two cents to it. The goal is to have a more lasting effect, which leads me to:
It’s far less ephemeral. Relevance it short-lived on social media. Any content, however thought-provoking, is gone within the hour, along with any quality discussion. The format of a public notebook lasts much longer. I particularly like this permanence of it, because it allows it to serve a broader purpose than just a curated list of links:
Far too often I want to get back to something I remember having read months ago, and I’m having trouble finding the content. Having a notebook in the first place makes this easier, but with a notebook annotated with my thoughts, it should be a piece of cake. I rarely remember the title or the exact words of the post I’m looking for, but I usually recall its sentiment and the impression it left on me, so I reckon being able to search through both might help.
I’ve decided to give this a go and start keeping a public notebook of interesting and relevant content I find on the Internet – a notebook that promotes sharing, discoverability, and permanence. See you there.